A nice parting shot from Mr. Justice Stevens

On the merits, I generally agree with the majority’s conclusion in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment applies to the states and not just the federal government; I also agree with the holding in Heller that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to possess and use guns. On the more specific question [...]

Ich kenn nur a bissel Yiddish

A friend and former student gave me the most wonderful gift today: a CD from the Yiddish Radio Project. It is features a remarkable array of music, dramas, talk shows, and commercials from the golden age of Yiddish radio in America (which the YRP identifies as running from the 1930s to the 1950s). Listening to [...]

Remember Fred Hampton & Mark Clark

Murdered by the Chicago Police Department, December 4, 1969

Stokes County Courthouse

Danbury, NC is a pretty little town along the Dan River, just about an hour’s leisurely drive northwest of my home. I passed through there today, and stopped to take some pictures of the Stokes County Courthouse (built in 1904). In front of the courthouse stands this memorial to local Confederate war dead. A central [...]

Greensboro Goddam

In the crush of a busy week, I nearly overlooked the fact that Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of the Greensboro Massacre, in which neo-Nazis and KKK members murdered five anti-racist and labor activists and wounded another eleven. As far as I can tell, the anniversary passed without any official public commemoration in Greensboro. I [...]

Un recuerdo 11 de Septiembre 1973

Natural selection: Yes, we can!

Mike Rosulek, computer science graduate student at the University of Illinois, has designed a set of images, based on the ubiquitous Shepard Fairey Obama image, to commemorate the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth. This is my personal favorite, in part because of the (presumably unintended, though Rosulek sounds like a Czech name, so perhaps it was [...]

Happy 200th, Abe & Charles

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”

My trip to eastern North Carolina this weekend wasn’t all fun and games and pirates. I came out here to meet with a group of truckers who are organizing a union after growing fed up with having their livlihoods left to the whim of the bosses. This is a remarkable group in many ways. In [...]

McElree’s Wine of Cardui

Washington, North Carolina “Wine of Cardui” was a patent medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marketed as a cure for “female diseases”.  In 1916, the Chattanooga Medicine Company, which made Wine of Cardui, won a libel suit against the American Medical Association, which had published an article in its Journal calling the [...]